OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Learning Vision-Based Omnidirectional Navigation: A Teacher-Student Approach Using Monocular Depth Estimation
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2026
Year: 2026

Reliable obstacle avoidance in industrial settings demands 3D scene understanding, but widely used 2D LiDAR sensors perceive only a single horizontal slice of the environment, missing critical obstacles above or below the scan plane. We present a teacher-student framework for vision-based mobile robot navigation that eliminates the need for LiDAR sensors. A teacher policy trained via Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) in NVIDIA Isaac Lab leverages privileged 2D LiDAR observations that account for the full robot footprint to learn robust navigation. The learned behavior is distilled into a student policy that relies solely on monocular depth maps predicted by a fine-tuned Depth Anything V2 model from four RGB cameras. The complete inference pipeline, comprising monocular depth estimation (MDE), policy execution, and motor control, runs entirely onboard an NVIDIA Jetson Orin AGX mounted on a DJI RoboMaster platform, requiring no external computation for inference. In simulation, the student achieves success rates of 82-96.5%, consistently outperforming the standard 2D LiDAR teacher (50-89%). In real-world experiments, the MDE-based student outperforms the 2D LiDAR teacher when navigating around obstacles with complex 3D geometries, such as overhanging structures and low-profile objects, that fall outside the single scan plane of a 2D LiDAR.
CodecFlow: Efficient Bandwidth Extension via Conditional Flow Matching in Neural Codec Latent Space
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2026
Year: 2026

Speech Bandwidth Extension improves clarity and intelligibility by restoring/inferring appropriate high-frequency content for low-bandwidth speech. Existing methods often rely on spectrogram or waveform modeling, which can incur higher computational cost and have limited high-frequency fidelity. Neural audio codecs offer compact latent representations that better preserve acoustic detail, yet accurately recovering high-resolution latent information remains challenging due to representation mismatch. We present CodecFlow, a neural codec-based BWE framework that performs efficient speech reconstruction in a compact latent space. CodecFlow employs a voicing-aware conditional flow converter on continuous codec embeddings and a structure-constrained residual vector quantizer to improve latent alignment stability. Optimized end-to-end, CodecFlow achieves strong spectral fidelity and enhanced perceptual quality on 8 kHz to 16 kHz and 44.1 kHz speech BWE tasks.
Learning to Read Where to Look: Disease-Aware Vision-Language Pretraining for 3D CT
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2026
Year: 2026

Recent 3D CT vision-language models align volumes with reports via contrastive pretraining, but typically rely on limited public data and provide only coarse global supervision. We train a 3D CT vision-language model on 98k report-volume pairs (50k patients) collected at a single hospital, combined with public datasets, using SigLIP-style contrastive pretraining together with prompt-based disease supervision in the shared vision-text embedding space. On CT-RATE, our model achieves state-of-the-art text-to-image retrieval (R@10 31.5 vs. 22.2) and competitive disease classification (AUC 83.8 vs. 83.8), with consistent results on Rad-ChestCT (AUC 77.0 vs. 77.3). We further observe that radiologists routinely reference specific images within their reports (e.g., ``series X, image Y''), linking textual descriptions to precise axial locations. We automatically mine 262k such snippet-slice pairs and introduce the task of intra-scan snippet localization -- predicting the axial depth referred to by a text snippet -- reducing mean absolute error to 36.3 mm at 12 mm feature resolution, compared with 67.0 mm for the best baseline. Adding this localization objective leaves retrieval and classification broadly unchanged within confidence bounds, yielding a single unified model for retrieval, classification, and intra-scan grounding.
Rich Insights from Cheap Signals: Efficient Evaluations via Tensor Factorization
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2026
Year: 2026

Moving beyond evaluations that collapse performance across heterogeneous prompts toward fine-grained evaluation at the prompt level, or within relatively homogeneous subsets, is necessary to diagnose generative models' strengths and weaknesses. Such fine-grained evaluations, however, suffer from a data bottleneck: human gold-standard labels are too costly at this scale, while automated ratings are often misaligned with human judgment. To resolve this challenge, we propose a novel statistical model based on tensor factorization that merges cheap autorater data with a limited set of human gold-standard labels. Specifically, our approach uses autorater scores to pretrain latent representations of prompts and generative models, and then aligns those pretrained representations to human preferences using a small calibration set. This sample-efficient methodology is robust to autorater quality, more accurately predicts human preferences on a per-prompt basis than standard baselines, and provides tight confidence intervals for key statistical parameters of interest. We also showcase the practical utility of our method by constructing granular leaderboards based on prompt qualities and by estimating model performance solely from autorater scores, eliminating the need for additional human annotations.
Characterization of Blind Code Rate Recovery in Linear Block Codes
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2026
Year: 2026

Forward Error Correction (FEC) is used ubiquitously in the communication pipeline. We explore noncooperative decoding where we aim to recover the code rate of a linear block code. We present a metric to characterize the quality of the code rate recovery which uses any rank based estimation technique. We derive a closed form expression for this metric in terms of the algorithmic and the environmental parameters and assert that it should be low for good recovery. We use this metric to derive an expression for a better code rate estimate in high noise conditions and compare it with existing estimates. Finally we validate the derived expression for the metric and the improved performance in the code rate estimate by simulating the recovery of a Low Density Parity Check (LDPC) code. This also enables us to derive the optimal algorithmic parameters for recovery.
Expanding LLM Agent Boundaries with Strategy-Guided Exploration
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2026
Year: 2026

Reinforcement learning (RL) has demonstrated notable success in post-training large language models (LLMs) as agents for tasks such as computer use, tool calling, and coding. However, exploration remains a central challenge in RL for LLM agents, especially as they operate in language-action spaces with complex observations and sparse outcome rewards. In this work, we address exploration for LLM agents by leveraging the ability of LLMs to plan and reason in language about the environment to shift exploration from low-level actions to higher-level language strategies. We thus propose Strategy-Guided Exploration (SGE), which first generates a concise natural-language strategy that describes what to do to make progress toward the goal, and then generates environment actions conditioned on that strategy. By exploring in the space of strategies rather than the space of actions, SGE induces structured and diverse exploration that targets different environment outcomes. To increase strategy diversity during RL, SGE introduces mixed-temperature sampling, which explores diverse strategies in parallel, along with a strategy reflection process that grounds strategy generation on the outcomes of previous strategies in the environment. Across UI interaction, tool-calling, coding, and embodied agent environments, SGE consistently outperforms exploration-focused RL baselines, improving both learning efficiency and final performance. We show that SGE enables the agent to learn to solve tasks too difficult for the base model.
"When to Hand Off, When to Work Together": Expanding Human-Agent Co-Creative Collaboration through Concurrent Interaction
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2026
Year: 2026

Human collaborators coordinate dynamically through process visibility and workspace awareness, yet AI agents typically either provide only final outputs or expose read-only execution processes (e.g., planning, reasoning) without interpreting concurrent user actions on shared artifacts. Building on mixed-initiative interaction principles, we explore whether agents can achieve collaborative context awareness -- interpreting concurrent user actions on shared artifacts and adapting in real-time. Study 1 (N=10 professional designers) revealed that process visibility enabled reasoning about agent actions but exposed conflicts when agents could not distinguish feedback from independent work. We developed CLEO, which interprets collaborative intent and adapts in real-time. Study 2 (N=10, two-day with stimulated recall interviews) analyzed 214 turns, identifying five action patterns, six triggers, and four enabling factors explaining when designers choose delegation (70.1%), direction (28.5%), or concurrent work (31.8%). We present a decision model with six interaction loops, design implications, and an annotated dataset.
Beyond Microservices: Testing Web-Scale RCA Methods on GPU-Driven LLM Workloads
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2026
Year: 2026

Large language model (LLM) services have become an integral part of search, assistance, and decision-making applications. However, unlike traditional web or microservices, the hardware and software stack enabling LLM inference deployment is of higher complexity and far less field-tested, making it more susceptible to failures that are difficult to resolve. Keeping outage costs and quality of service degradations in check depends on shortening mean time to repair, which in practice is gated by how quickly the fault is identified, located, and diagnosed. Automated root cause analysis (RCA) accelerates failure localization by identifying the system component that failed and tracing how the failure propagated. Numerous RCA methods have been developed for traditional services, using request path tracing, resource metric and log data analysis. Yet, existing RCA methods have not been designed for LLM deployments that present distinct runtime characteristics. In this study, we evaluate the effectiveness of RCA methods on a best-practice LLM inference deployment under controlled failure injections. Across 24 methods (20 metric-based, two trace-based, and two multi-source), we find that multi-source approaches achieve the highest accuracy, metric-based methods show fault-type-dependent performance, and trace-based methods largely fail. These results reveal that existing RCA tools do not generalize to LLM systems, motivating tailored analysis techniques and enhanced observability, for which we formulate guidelines.
Exploring Plan Space through Conversation: An Agentic Framework for LLM-Mediated Explanations in Planning
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2026
Year: 2026

When automating plan generation for a real-world sequential decision problem, the goal is often not to replace the human planner, but to facilitate an iterative reasoning and elicitation process, where the human's role is to guide the AI planner according to their preferences and expertise. In this context, explanations that respond to users' questions are crucial to improve their understanding of potential solutions and increase their trust in the system. To enable natural interaction with such a system, we present a multi-agent Large Language Model (LLM) architecture that is agnostic to the explanation framework and enables user- and context-dependent interactive explanations. We also describe an instantiation of this framework for goal-conflict explanations, which we use to conduct a user study comparing the LLM-powered interaction with a baseline template-based explanation interface.
MMNavAgent: Multi-Magnification WSI Navigation Agent for Clinically Consistent Whole-Slide Analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2026
Year: 2026

Recent AI navigation approaches aim to improve Whole-Slide Image (WSI) diagnosis by modeling spatial exploration and selecting diagnostically relevant regions, yet most operate at a single fixed magnification or rely on predefined magnification traversal. In clinical practice, pathologists examine slides across multiple magnifications and selectively inspect only necessary scales, dynamically integrating global and cellular evidence in a sequential manner. This mismatch prevents existing methods from modeling cross-magnification interactions and adaptive magnification selection inherent to real diagnostic workflows. To these, we propose a clinically consistent Multi-Magnification WSI Navigation Agent (MMNavAgent) that explicitly models multi magnification interaction and adaptive magnification selection. Specifically, we introduce a Cross-Magnification navigation Tool (CMT) that aggregates contextual information from adjacent magnifications to enhance discriminative representations along the navigation path. We further introduce a Magnification Selection Tool (MST) that leverages memory-driven reasoning within the agent framework to enable interactive and adaptive magnification selection, mimicking the sequential decision process of pathologists. Extensive experiments on a public dataset demonstrate improved diagnostic performance, with 1.45% gain of AUC and 2.93% gain of BACC over a non-agent baseline. Code will be public upon acceptance.
$π$-StepNFT: Wider Space Needs Finer Steps in Online RL for Flow-based VLAs
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2026
Year: 2026

Flow-based vision-language-action (VLA) models excel in embodied control but suffer from intractable likelihoods during multi-step sampling, hindering online reinforcement learning. We propose \textbf{\textit{$\boldsymbolπ$-StepNFT}} (Step-wise Negative-aware Fine-Tuning), a critic-and-likelihood-free framework that requires only a single forward pass per optimization step and eliminates auxiliary value networks. We identify that wider exploration spaces necessitate finer-grained, step-wise guidance for alignment. Empirically, $π$-StepNFT unlocks latent potential on LIBERO with competitive few-shot robustness. Moreover, it achieves superior generalization on ManiSkill, outperforming value-based baselines in OOD scenarios by preventing overfitting to multimodal features. This property offers a scalable solution promising for complex real-world applications.
Recursive Think-Answer Process for LLMs and VLMs
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2026
Year: 2026

Think-Answer reasoners such as DeepSeek-R1 have made notable progress by leveraging interpretable internal reasoning. However, despite the frequent presence of self-reflective cues like "Oops!", they remain vulnerable to output errors during single-pass inference. To address this limitation, we propose an efficient Recursive Think-Answer Process (R-TAP) that enables models to engage in iterative reasoning cycles and generate more accurate answers, going beyond conventional single-pass approaches. Central to this approach is a confidence generator that evaluates the certainty of model responses and guides subsequent improvements. By incorporating two complementary rewards-Recursively Confidence Increase Reward and Final Answer Confidence Reward-we show that R-TAP-enhanced models consistently outperform conventional single-pass methods for both large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models (VLMs). Moreover, by analyzing the frequency of "Oops"-like expressions in model responses, we find that R-TAP-applied models exhibit significantly fewer self-reflective patterns, resulting in more stable and faster inference-time reasoning. We hope R-TAP pave the way evolving into efficient and elaborated methods to refine the reasoning processes of future AI.
Stochastic Multi-Armed Bandits with Limited Control Variates
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2026
Year: 2026

Motivated by wireless networks where interference or channel state estimates provide partial insight into throughput, we study a variant of the classical stochastic multi-armed bandit problem in which the learner has limited access to auxiliary information. Recent work has shown that such auxiliary information, when available as control variates, can be used to get tighter confidence bounds, leading to lower regret. However, existing works assume that control variates are available in every round, which may not be realistic in several real-life scenarios. To address this, we propose UCB-LCV, an upper confidence bound (UCB) based algorithm that effectively combines the estimators obtained from rewards and control variates. When there is no control variate, UCB-LCV leads to a novel algorithm that we call UCB-NORMAL, outperforming its existing algorithms for the standard MAB setting with normally distributed rewards. Finally, we discuss variants of the proposed UCB-LCV that apply to general distributions and experimentally demonstrate that UCB-LCV outperforms existing bandit algorithms.
Pencil Puzzle Bench: A Benchmark for Multi-Step Verifiable Reasoning
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2026
Year: 2026

We introduce Pencil Puzzle Bench, a framework for evaluating large language model reasoning through pencil puzzles, a family of constraint-satisfaction problems closely related to NP-complete problems, with deterministic, step-level verification. From a database of 62,231 puzzles across 94 varieties with verified unique solutions, we select a benchmark of 300 puzzles spanning 20 varieties and evaluate 51 models from 11 providers in two modes: direct ask (single-shot) and agentic (multi-turn with iterative verification). A key differentiator of our benchmark is that every intermediate board state can be checked against variety-specific constraints, localizing errors to the exact rule violated, providing the infrastructure for dense, per-move reward signals for process supervision and reinforcement learning. Our evaluation reveals two distinct axes of capability: (1) reasoning effort scaling, where GPT-5.2 improves 81x from no reasoning to maximum effort; and (2) agentic iteration, where Claude Opus 4.6 rises from 0.3% to 30.0% through iterative checking, while GPT-5.2@xhigh improves from 20.2% to 56.0%. Agentic attempts span a median of 29 turns over 17 minutes, with the longest exceeding 1,221 turns and 14.3 hours - a demanding test of long-context utilization, not just reasoning.
Generative AI in Software Testing: Current Trends and Future Directions
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2026
Year: 2026

This paper investigates current software testing systems and explores how artificial intelligence, specifically Generative AI, can be integrated to enhance these systems. It begins by examining different types of AI systems and focuses on the potential of Generative AI to transform software testing processes by improving test coverage, increasing efficiency, and reducing costs. The study provides a com-prehensive overview of the current applications of AI in software testing, emphasizing its significant contributions in areas such as test case generation and validation. Through an extensive literature re-view, it highlights how Generative AI can streamline these processes, resulting in more robust and thorough testing outcomes. The paper also examines methods to improve the efficiency of Generative AI systems, such as prompt engineering and fine-tuning. Additionally, it explores the use of AI in specific tasks, including input generation, oracle generation, data generation, test data creation, and test case prioritization. By analyzing the current landscape and identifying both the opportunities and challenges in integrating Generative AI, this paper provides valuable insights and recommendations for practitioners and researchers. It underscores the need for ongoing advancements and targeted development efforts to overcome existing hurdles and fully leverage AI's capabilities. The findings further show that with continued innovation and careful implementation, Generative AI has the potential to significantly enhance the efficiency, effectiveness, and reliability of software testing, particularly in the rapidly evolving field of IoT testing.
Machine Learning (ML) library in Linux kernel
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2026
Year: 2026

Linux kernel is a huge code base with enormous number of subsystems and possible configuration options that results in unmanageable complexity of elaborating an efficient configuration. Machine Learning (ML) is approach/area of learning from data, finding patterns, and making predictions without implementing algorithms by developers that can introduce a self-evolving capability in Linux kernel. However, introduction of ML approaches in Linux kernel is not easy way because there is no direct use of floating-point operations (FPU) in kernel space and, potentially, ML models can be a reason of significant performance degradation in Linux kernel. Paper suggests the ML infrastructure architecture in Linux kernel that can solve the declared problem and introduce of employing ML models in kernel space. Suggested approach of kernel ML library has been implemented as Proof Of Concept (PoC) project with the goal to demonstrate feasibility of the suggestion and to design the interface of interaction the kernel-space ML model proxy and the ML model user-space thread.
Zero- and Few-Shot Named-Entity Recognition: Case Study and Dataset in the Crime Domain (CrimeNER)
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2026
Year: 2026

The extraction of critical information from crime-related documents is a crucial task for law enforcement agencies. Named-Entity Recognition (NER) can perform this task in extracting information about the crime, the criminal, or law enforcement agencies involved. However, there is a considerable lack of adequately annotated data on general real-world crime scenarios. To address this issue, we present CrimeNER, a case-study of Crime-related zero- and Few-Shot NER, and a general Crime-related Named-Entity Recognition database (CrimeNERdb) consisting of more than 1.5k annotated documents for the NER task extracted from public reports on terrorist attacks and the U.S. Department of Justice's press notes. We define 5 types of coarse crime entity and a total of 22 types of fine-grained entity. We address the quality of the case-study and the annotated data with experiments on Zero and Few-Shot settings with State-of-the-Art NER models as well as generalist and commonly used Large Language Models.
Near-Optimal Regret for KL-Regularized Multi-Armed Bandits
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2026
Year: 2026

Recent studies have shown that reinforcement learning with KL-regularized objectives can enjoy faster rates of convergence or logarithmic regret, in contrast to the classical $\sqrt{T}$-type regret in the unregularized setting. However, the statistical efficiency of online learning with respect to KL-regularized objectives remains far from completely characterized, even when specialized to multi-armed bandits (MABs). We address this problem for MABs via a sharp analysis of KL-UCB using a novel peeling argument, which yields a $\tilde{O}(ηK\log^2T)$ upper bound: the first high-probability regret bound with linear dependence on $K$. Here, $T$ is the time horizon, $K$ is the number of arms, $η^{-1}$ is the regularization intensity, and $\tilde{O}$ hides all logarithmic factors except those involving $\log T$. The near-tightness of our analysis is certified by the first non-constant lower bound $Ω(ηK \log T)$, which follows from subtle hard-instance constructions and a tailored decomposition of the Bayes prior. Moreover, in the low-regularization regime (i.e., large $η$), we show that the KL-regularized regret for MABs is $η$-independent and scales as $\tildeΘ(\sqrt{KT})$. Overall, our results provide a thorough understanding of KL-regularized MABs across all regimes of $η$ and yield nearly optimal bounds in terms of $K$, $η$, and $T$.